Leda barely had any time to work through the shock of hearing English of all things before the monster popped its jaw and growled something in its own language. It tightened its hand around her throat, and she spluttered, kicking feebly at its shins.
Black lips peeled away from broken, rotting teeth as it laughed. The stench of its breath rolled over her and stung her eyes, making them flutter and water. The lack of oxygen was making it feel like her brain was swelling.
Pain bloomed across her jaw and the taser slipped a little in her weakening grip.
The monster was going to crush her throat. She was going to die.
There would be no finding out the truth about her mum. No telling dad that he had been right. No asking out that guy in the coffee shop and trying her hand at making friends. Actual friends.
Sadness welled in her chest as the smirking creature shook her roughly and switched back to English for one last garbled taunt.
"Tell your people to send someone better next time." It growled.
Her eyes bugged and the last of her breath wheezed out, just as the taser flashed white-blue and buzzed to life in her hand.
She didn't know where the strength came from but one second the taser had almost slipped from her slack fingers and the next it was gripped tight and stuck in the monster's neck.
The effect was instant. Its laughter choked off and its brow lowered before its eyes blew wide, bugging from its misshapen head.
It jerked and flung her limp body to the side. Her back hit the tree with a thunk. The fall tangled her legs together as she fell onto her side, winded. She sucked in a large breath, but the dry air tickled her bruised throat and hacking coughs racked her frame as she tried to sit up.
As she blinked away the stun from her fall, the monster collapsed beside her, sprawling out on its back as it began to seize.
Sluggishly, she rolled onto her side and again pressed the taser into its shuddering neck again for good measure. Its seizing became violent. Spit bubbled and frothed at its lips and she only pulled away when its eyelids began to flutter. It kept thrashing until all its limbs seized at once and it was finally still.
As its chest rose and fell unevenly, cool relief began to mix with another feeling in her chest: guilt.
She had never hurt anything before, and she wasn't sure how that was supposed to make her feel.
Sure, it was a disfigured monster that had tried to kill her, but it was still a living thing- technically.
Graduating medical students never really said the full Hippocratic Oath unless they really wanted to. It was stupidly long and all the swearing to Apollo and Ancient Geekism's meant that the text had fallen out of fashion a good while ago. But everyone still took an Oath of some kind. The collective gist of them being: Do No Harm.
Leda had taken an Oath too. And even though the harm in question was non-lethal and absolutely necessary to the preservation of life (mainly hers) it still felt really…wrong.
She felt wrong. Like she'd changed. And she hadn't felt this wrong for a long, long time. It was unsettling, not being sure of herself.
The monster's fingers twitched, drawing her attention away from her crisis. Its black, beady eyes stared unseeingly up at the sky, but its breaths had seemed to even out. Was it recovering already?
Maybe then wasn't the time to start contemplating if her entire adult identity had been built on a she had allowed to become truth. She rubbed her sore throat as she tried to stand, and her backpack pulled heavily at her shoulders. If she could just get a bit away-
She yelped as a sword plunged into the monster's chest, cracking and scraping bone and cutting straight through any of her escape plans.
Dartha Guy was standing over her. He was leaning heavily on the hilt of his sword and roughly twisted the blade with a flick of his wrist. A squirt of warm black blood coated her lower face. It smelled putrid and she spat on the ground reflexively, frightened that some had gotten into her open mouth.
He was covered in a mix of dark fluid and what looked like chunks of flesh. Black goo dripped down the sharp contours of his pale cheeks as he yanked the sword out of the monster's carcass. Bone flicked up with it and Leda swapped her gaze between the cavity in the monster's chest and Dartha Guy's blood splattered face in utter revulsion.
What the fuck.
He frowned at the taser in her hand, sword twitching at his side as Leda tried to force a sentence past her shellshock.
"What- what the-"
He used his sword to point at her hand. "Man agóreg?"
The taser rattled in her grip and confused, she looked down, seeing a slight tremor in her hands. Her hands had always been steady. No matter what had happened they had always been still. So how were they shaking? Why weren't they steady? What was the fu-
The sword raised a little higher, dragging her out of her panic.
"Man agóreg?" He barked, narrowing his almond eyes.
His anger caused some of the fog of panic to clear, but she still couldn't seem to form a complete sentence. "W-what-"
He seemed to really like interrupting her because he jerked his chin up and made a clicking noise at the back of his throat to do it again. "Tolu."
Confused by the new words and half-thinking he would only cut her off again, she kept quiet.
Huffing, he looked about them quickly, scanning for any immediate danger. He muttered something under his breath before repeating the new word again. But slowly. Like she was a child, or worse, stupid.
"Tolu. To-lu."
She shrugged and his sword twitched.
"To-" He stumbled mid-step, ankle bending unnaturally. Instincts blighted the rest of her own panic and Leda was up and on her feet in record time, hands outstretched to catch him if he fell. She had just watched him kill four monsters in a row but as he shook his head as if to clear fog, she felt concern. Which was a relief. If that instinct to help- regardless of circumstance or morality was still intact then maybe she was ok. Maybe harming that monster hadn't changed her irreversibly.
He managed to right himself, but he blinked slowly, eyes wide as though he was confused. He tutted as she tried to advance and looked down to the hole in his armour, just above his left arm.
The metal had caved from the force of the attack, leaving behind a deep hole. He grimaced, and on his beautiful, stained face, it looked almost ghoulish.
She shoved the taser into her ripped pocket just as he stumbled again and leapt forward and under him, wrapping an arm around his lower chest to support him. She tensed her shoulder to brace against his weight, but she found she could manage easily even in her weakened state. He was far lighter than what she expected for someone so tall and broad.
Despite this, he was still awkward to support. More so when he hissed at her contact and tried to push her away.
"St-stop." Leda said, stumbling on her own wobbly knees and stepping on his feet as he tried to untangle himself.
"Leithio nin!" He spat, sword swinging particularly close to Leda's eye. "Leit- Leit-"
He stumbled and rested more of his weight, words breaking apart on his tongue. The deepening forest loomed ahead, and she shoved aside the itching need to abandon him and run back to the lake. He was a murderer, but he had helped her, and she took an Oath. And it meant something.
It took a bit to work out a rhythm to lead him, but eventually they worked out a pattern of Leda taking two steps and him taking one. He muttered and hissed like an animal the whole way and by the time they reached a sunny clearing in the forest, Leda was beginning to regret getting him out of dodge in the first place. She slowed them to a stop and looked about, straining her ears for any sounds of fighting.
The small clearing was ringed by tall, grey trees. The grass looked dry and brittle and she kicked dust up as they stumbled to the middle of the space. In places the ground looked scorched and surrounded by rings of ash and a stale smell hung about the air that tickled her nose unpleasantly.
Distracted by the new setting, she squeaked when Dartha Guy roughly pinched the sensitive skin of her elbow so that he could slip out of her hold.
She scowled at his back as he staggered a few steps to a lone tree stump. He sat with a heavy clutter of his armour and rested his sword on his lap. He hung his head down at an angle and his pale hair fell forward to obscure part of his face.
Leda rubbed the tender skin he had pinched and got the distinct impression that he was watching her from behind his hair.
"You're welcome." She muttered.
Exhausted, she sat in a heap in front of him and tried to forget the way his sword had sliced through bone as easily as if it had been air and the lack of remorse, he seemed to feel about it.
Her clothes were starting to dry in places, and she gagged at her own smell. God. She needed a shower. And therapy.
She lowered her head into her hands and grasped at the ends of her soaked, curling hair. What a fucking mess. Right now, the adrenaline and shock was keeping her from focusing too heavily on the bruise she could feel forming around her neck, but she knew that when she got home, she was going to be in a world of pain.
How was any of this even happening? She had just been assaulted and helped a man she saw kill living breathing things get away to safety.
"Christ." She whispered.
Dartha Guy allowed her exactly five more seconds of wallowing before he clucked his tongue to get her attention. She ignored him for a bit but when his foot nudged her leg she tiredly looked up.
"What?" She asked, drained.
From her lower positioning he looked even bigger than he had before. She hadn't heard his armour clink, but he'd tucked his hair behind his ears, and she blanched when she saw the way they curved up high into delicate points.
So. Monsters with black blood and blonde giants with pointy ears. What else could this nightmare throw at her?
He didn't respond. His face was blank, but she figured that he was probably as confused by her as she was of him.
How long would it be before the battle ended and his people came to get him? She didn't know if Mercury was still in retrograde or how long the Vortice (or whatever sci-fi crap it was) would be open. She wasn't even wearing a watch so she couldn't tell what time it was, and her phone was back on The Island, water damaged and dead. How long had she even been gone? It felt like minutes but maybe it was closer to hours? Christ. Why didn't she read the stupid pack properly?
Sodden, dejected and growing annoyed with herself and the impossible situation she was in, she couldn't help but bark at him even though technically it wasn't his fault.
(The Vortice thing, not the murder thing. That was definitely his fault.)
"What?" She growled, releasing the ends of her dripping hair. At least her hands hand stopped shaking. She didn't want to think about how much it freaked her out to see them tremble for the first time in years.
Dartha Guy's full lips mouthed the word before he repeated it perfectly. "What?"
She sat up straight so quickly that her back popped in protest, remembering the garbled English the monster had taunted her with before she'd fried its brain and maybe broken her Oath.
Sharp desperation bloomed in bet chest. If he could speak English like the monster, then maybe she wasn't as lost as she felt.
"You can speak English?" She asked, words almost slurring together in her haste to get them out.
"What?" He repeated and after a moment her shoulders slumped. The air rushed out of her lungs along with the brief bout of hope she had felt.
"Of course, you can't." She muttered, hands curling into fists. "Because why would you? I just travelled through a portal at the bottom of a lake on an island that technically doesn't exist. Why would any of this be easy?"
She laughed humourlessly and he watched her blankly as she ranted. "This might not even be Earth let alone a country with an indigenous population that speaks the same language as I do and also has pointy ears. Christ. How British of me to assume you would."
Still, he said nothing and for a brief moment she wished Julian was there too, his jibes would at least fill the void of silence and loss she couldn't seem to escape.
Dejected, she eyed the wound at his shoulder. His arm was hanging limply by his side and despite his aloofness, now that she looked closer she saw the awkward way in which he held his body, leaning slightly to his right to alleviate what must have been agony.
Communication was a total bust, but she was still a Doctor. She had trained for this. Well. Maybe not getting sucked through a portal right into the middle of a medieval battle but she was good at Emergency Medicine. Great, at it, actually. She didn't know jack about sword fights, but she could dress a wound in her sleep. She could help. And maybe helping him would distract her from the looming feeling that everything was spinning out of control.
Driven, she tipped her backpack upside down and groaned when everything fell out with a whoosh of dirty water. The shirt she had shed in Bermuda was soaked and muddied and the Aether Group pack was a mush of white paper and bleeding black ink.
Opening her Med pack revealed even worse news and her heart shrivelled with each new disappointment as she went through it.
Most of it was contaminated. She didn't trust most of the sealed needles, worried that water had gotten inside. All of the bandage rolls seemed dry enough though, so she set them aside in a Yes pile and threw the Doxycycline, Metronidazole and Cefalexin pill packets into a No pile.
Dartha Guy quietly watched her work and by the time she was done the No pile was a large soaked mess of everything actually useful for getting lost on an island and spat out by a pissed off Vortice. The Yes pile however, consisted of one dodgy taser, two packs of bandages, one antiseptic wipe, questionable injections of 10mg of morphine and 1mg of Epinephrine, a couple of wet pens, a waterlogged stethoscope, 2 sterile wound dressings and a half empty bottle of plane water. Not exactly what you wanted with you on an unexpected journey, but she'd have to make do.
She picked up the bandages and sighed, wiping the excess water clinging to the packet on her damp thigh. "Let me look at it."
He blinked his large cat-like eyes slowly. "What?"
"Well at least you're using it the right way now." She said with a snort.
She pointed to his shoulder and shook the bandage pack. "I can help. Let me see it."
He shook his head and she rolled her eyes at his refusal. He'd just chopped up countless monsters, but he drew the line at bandages?
"Come on. I can he-."
He held up a hand, cutting her off and his head tilted to the side as if he was listening for something. His right ear twitched and seemed to swivel slightly, coming to lie flat against his hair. Did it move independently or was it reflexive like a cats? Maybe his (and she still couldn't believe she was even contemplating this) 'species' were part-feline? It would it explain the angular features and large, probing eyes. And the ears. It might help explain the ears.
Just as abruptly as his hand rose it flicked inward to his chest and he rapped his knuckles on his chest plate. He settled his heavy gaze back on her and she shivered, almost feeling the weight of it.
"Len suilon. I eneth nîn Gildor Inglorion. Man i eneth lîn?" He said and she blinked, thrown. What was he saying? Was he trying to tell her his name?
"Uh…" She shrugged and he tapped his chest again.
"Gildor Inglorion."
"Gildor Ingolori-an?" She hedged uncertain, forgetting all about his injury for a moment.
He- well, Gildor Inglorion, she guessed, shook his head. "Gildor Ing-Lorion."
He made her repeat it until she had it right and then pointed to her.
"Uh-" She awkwardly tapped her chest. "Leda Acker shit- I mean- I don't- Well- uh it's just easier to say Gauling."
"Leda Acker shit- I mean- I don't- Well- uh it's just easier to say Gauling." He repeated perfectly, startling a loud guffaw out of her chest.
"No." She snorted and Gildor Inglorion frowned as she shook her head and flung about droplets of water that had gathered at the ends. "Leda Gauling."
"Leda Acker Gauling."
"No!" She said quickly but he looked confused and her shoulders slumped in premature defeat. "Fine. Leda Acker Gauling."
He nodded once and said seriously: " Len suilon, Leda Acker Gauling."
She managed a small, nervous smile and tried to match his serious tone. "Uh- yeah. Len suilon, Gildor Inglorion."
Gildor didn't smile back, but his seriousness bled away and a distinct softness played at the corners of his mouth. It was enough of a thaw that she guessed that at least he could smile. Maybe. Maybe his people didn't know how. Maybe they (whatever the hell he was because it was becoming clear that he was entirely human) didn't have smiling in their culture. Maybe she'd just accidentally called his mum a whore by smiling.
She was so out of her depth.
She wasn't a linguist or an archaeologist. She didn't know anything about new cultures or species or worlds. She was a Doctor. The most she could do now was try to patch him up, go home and bring back the people who actually knew a thing or two about this kind of crap.
"Let me at least look at it." She said again and stood up painfully. He was tall enough that even standing, their eyes were almost level. "You don't even know what I'm saying but you saved my life. And despite all the murdering I just watched you commit; I should probably return the favour."
Gildor Inglorion eyes narrowed as she approached and his hand flew to his sword, fingers wrapping around the handle and slightly lifting it off his lap.
She held out her hands, palm up. "Just let me see. I can help." A beat passed before he let go of his sword but kept his hand hovering over it in case.
She bent to look at his wound and wrinkled her nose in disgust. It had begun to weep a dark red liquid and it smelled awful.
"Sorry." She muttered, distracted, already looking for a way to take off the armour without aggravating the injury. He must have guessed what she was thinking though because he reached under the armour with his good hand and flicked something inside.
The armour split at the side and fell away, clattering to the ground loudly.
Beneath it he was wearing the long-sleeve black chainmail she had seen earlier. He groaned when he lifted his arms to slip it off and Leda tried to help where she could. After wrestling with it and enduring him spitting his weird words at her when she accidentally hurt him, they managed to get it off. It was lighter than it looked but still heavy and Leda let it fall from her grasp like liquid onto his discarded breastplate.
The de-robing left him nude from the waist up and although Leda had her Doctor brain on, she also tried to catalogue as many genetic similarities as she could for when she went home. Two nipples? Check. Adam's apple? Check. No hair on his chest or arms but maybe he liked to shave it off?
He took off his thin gloves as she assessed him. Upper arm, elbow, forearm, wrist. Check. Three long, pale fingers, finger nai-
Three fingers?
She checked for any signs of injury around his knuckles, but the skin was smooth on each hand. He hadn't lost two indexes' in a freak accident. He just didn't have them.
She almost laughed from disbelief. But of course. Because why would he have four? That would be asking far too much.
He grunted and flicked her arm to grab back her attention. She scowled and tried to ignore this new revelation because technically it wasn't important right now and she could touch them later to make sure they were real and that she hadn't just lost a lot of oxygen to her brain when she almost got choked out by Shrek on Steroids. She had a job to do. Patch him up and then worry about missing appendages.
Leda gently prodded the skin around the hole but jumped when his three fingered hand wrapped tightly around her wrist. His hand was cool and definitely not anywhere near a perfect thirty-seven Celsius. Was he sick?
He yanked her forward and she stumbled, trying to keep her footing. Grey eyes stared hard into hers and she steeled herself against being in such proximity to a man who hacked into somethings chest like a savage and then swooped in to save her life like a literal white knight all within the same day.
She clenched her jaw and tried to put everything conviction she had into her voice. "I took an Oath. I'm not going to hurt you."
He huffed but inclined his head a fraction. He squeezed her wrist once in warning before slowly letting go, one long finger at a time.
The wound looked gnarly up close. Black lines ringed the broken skin but it wasn't as deep as she had thought before. The armour seemed to have taken most damage but what were the black jagged lines? Infection perhaps? That would be way too quick. Maybe a poison, then?
"Alright," she said, brandishing the bandage roll. Gildor Inglorion's ear twitched and she sighed. "Let's get this over with."
. . .
Gildor Inglorion was the most annoying patient she had ever had. He hissed and barked rough sounding (what she guessed were) insults at her, he moved all the time and he wouldn't stop touching things. If she hadn't seen him commit about fifty war crimes an hour ago, she might have found him charming if a little maddening.
Once he realised, she wasn't trying to kill him he had pulled a one-eighty. He spent the first part of his treatment amusing himself with her water bottle. She almost punched him when he untwisted the cap and watched with wide eyes as the water dropped to the dry earth, throwing away her only clean water supply.
Next, he ripped off his wound dressing and played with the sticky bits, causing her to use her last one to seal the hole in his stupidly ripped chest. Now he seemed intent on breaking his next thing.
"Stop it." She said for the fiftieth time in ten minutes as she placed the stethoscopes eartips in her ears and adjusted the binaural on her chin. He tried to snatch it out of her grasp, and she flicked his knuckles in warning. "I said- stop."
She breathed on the chest-piece before laying it on his skin, but he still hissed at its coldness.
"Shhhh," she whispered, straining to hear his heartbeat. She frowned when met with a generic sound of blood and fluid moving.
What?
She placed it on her chest and nodded to herself when her (slightly elevated but steady) heartbeat sounded. She turned to put it back on his torso, but he moved her hand to the right side of his chest and down to where his kidney should be.
Instead of the whoosh of bodily fluid, a quick but steady thump began. It was too fast to match a human heart but at least he had a heart. Even if it was in the wrong place. The tempo was more of a ba-da-da, ba-da-da rather than a ba-bum ba-bum.
She didn't have a watch, so she used her free hand to count on her fingers but lost count four times because he kept trying to inspect her fingers by grabbing at them.
"Stop!" She snapped, flicking his weird fingers away again when they reached for hers. "I have to count."
He huffed but paused his inspection to allow her to do her job, but she ended up counting four times before how the hell did, he have a resting heartrate of three-ninety?
She shot him a concerned look as she counted for a third time. He shouldn't be able to sit up let alone have enough energy to inspect her.
He returned her worried look with a blank one of his own and she exhaled heavily. As concerning as it was, maybe she should just chalk it up to it being part of the long list of things wrong with him. Three fingers, no body hair, cat-ears and now a heart rate that should have had him dead before he turned three.
Well. As long as he didn't go into sudden cardiac arrest, she wasn't going to try and fix something that didn't seem to be causing him any discomfort.
Satisfied that he was a living breathing...thing, she took the ear bus out, only for him to immediately snatch the stethoscope out of her hand.
"Hey!" She cried but he ignored her and took a leaf out if her book and flicked her fingers as they tried to grab it back.
He twirled it in his hands before popping the eartips inside his large weird ears and she grimaced. She was going to have to wash those.
He muttered some words at her, too quick and low for her to fully pick up.
"Huh?" She grunted. Job done; her eyes had already begun to look around the clearing. It'd taken about twenty minutes to dress his wound, surely the fighting would be over by now. She worried her lip with her teeth and winced when her tooth sliced into her fleshy bottom lip. She couldn't stay with him forever. She had to get back home.
Professor Morgan had said the Vortice would be open for a few more weeks, but what if she wasn't even on earth anymore? What if Mercury didn't exist where she was?
Her chest fluttered and she rubbed at it with a fist, uncomfortable.
If they didn't have a Mercury, then was the Vortice a one-way ticket? Was she stuck on this backwater fantasy hell dimension until she died, alone and unable to communicate for the same reason she had failed GCSE French: "not having even the slightest grasp on linguistics"?
She began to find it hard to draw in a complete breath and lowered to her knees. Sitting was better, at least. It was stable. Unlike her. Unstable in a weird place without any resources.
Gildor Inglorion said something above her head but she could barely hear him over the sound of her heart in her ears.
What if she couldn't get home? What if this is what had happened to her mum? What if she had popped up in a battle but Gildor wasn't there to help her? And what if she was dead? Like, she'd died at the battle and all of this was some weird dream she was having in the seconds before her brain died? What if-
"Leda Acker Gauling!" Gildor shouted, startling her.
He had slid down from the tree stump and pushed himself into her personal space. He had one arm around her neck, hooking her in and another around her waist to secure her. Their noses were practically touching, and Leda grew immediately uncomfortably with his easy manhandling of her and the intimacy of such a position. She felt exposed.
The grey in his eyes seemed to glow in their intensity and she instinctively tried to pull away, but he held fast. Much to her annoyance, her eyes grew wet and she knew her face was crumbling by the panic creeping into the corners of his mouth.
"I'm ok." She muttered thickly. But she wasn't. She was stuck. And a murderer was trying to comfort her. Everything was all wrong and why hadn't dad just picked up the goddamn phone?
She pushed at his arm until he released her, but he maintained his close position.
With a sniff, she wiggled a damp wrist between their bodies to rub at the corner of her eye. "I'm ok, Gildor Inglorion."
Hesitantly, he laid a large hand over her bony, damp shoulder.
"Leda Acker Gauling." He breathed, sadly.
It was all he could say but he said it so softly, and with such feeling that it only made her more upset and she began to weep in earnest.
He tutted like a mother would and wrapped his long arms around her sticky wet clothes and pulled her to his bare chest and it was so strange that she didn't even tell him to let go.
She couldn't remember the last time someone hugged her. Let alone the last time someone had seen her cry.
He said something in his language and Leda took the time as she sniffled pathetically to note how lovely the words were. It almost sounded like he was singing.
"I'm ok." She hiccupped into his chest.
She tried to pull away when it felt like she wasn't about to collapse into a puddle of sadness, but he held fast and she actually let him. Which was probably, considering the monsters and murder and three fingers and pointy ears, the strangest thing she had experienced that entire day.
Eventually his arms grew slack and he relaxed against her. She tried to pull back, but he kept leaning on her and she huffed a watery laugh.
She pushed his chest gently with her shoulder.
"Gildor Inglorion I said I'm fi-"
He fell away onto his back, eyes half-closed and pale cheeks flushed.
The black lines from his injury were longer, creeping from under the square wound dressing and crawling up and down his chest and arm.
"Shit!"
She scrambled forward and lay her head on his chest, getting the placement of his heart wrong three times before resting her ear in the right (wrong) place.
It beat only faintly but she was so unaccustomed to his physiology that she couldn't be sure if that's how it always was or if earlier was how it always was or- or-
There was no time for ruminations on physiology. Get supplies, help him, go home. That was her plan. That was the only plan.
She braced herself, ready about to jump up and rifle through the Yes pile for something- anything to help but she couldn't because one minute Gildor Inglorion was in front of her and the next he was being dragged away by his shoulders and hidden behind someone in full armour.
On reflex she stood quickly, ignoring the rush of blood to her head and the heavily armoured person in front of her. She twisted on her ankle to run back towards her stuff but smacked face first into someone's plated chest. She squeaked and took a step back, but they grabbed her shoulder and the weight of it kept her melded to the spot.
The world seemed to slow around her and as she followed the hand to the body and up and up to the attached face. She gulped when she realised who it was.
It was the blonde from the river, all six-foot infinity of him.
Up close he was even more terrifying. A proud face, still twisted in rage, was bordered by braided blonde hair that, when it caught the light, shined like liquid gold. His eyes were almond shaped and angled and bordered by high cheek bones and dark blonde eyebrows pulled down into a glare.
If Leda wasn't half convinced that she was about to piss herself, she might have been more appreciative of his savage beauty.
Gone was Gildor's softness.
Here was the monster she had seen cut a head in half with no remorse.
Translations
Sindarin-
Leithio nin: Release Me
Len suilon. I eneth nîn Gildor Inglorion. Man i eneth lîn?: I greet you. My name is Gildor Inglorion. What is your name?
Man agóreg?: What did you do?
Quenya-
Tolu: Stand/Get up
Hi guys!
I apologise for how long this took, and I won't make any promises for the next chapter. As usual, this is over-edited but Fateme reminded me on Twitter that I shouldn't try to be a perfectionist and she's right. My fretting about this story is getting to me and it's stopping me from just writing. It shouldn't take me six thousand words to get from the Bruinen to half-way to Rivendell, you know? But I'm trying to get back to scene writing so hopefully the next few chapters will be easier, and I can update faster. Introductions aren't my best, so I hope you like Gildor and I hope Leda's emotions weren't all over the place. I hope you enjoyed the chapter and if anyone has any tips for battling over-editing, please let me know! Also, this was proof-read after a nine hour shift so if you catch any mistakes let me know!
In other news, I think I'm comfortable sharing with you guys that I got a First in my fiction for this half of my MA! I wrote original fiction for it and the University loved it. I've never been prouder of myself. I still think I'm not the best at writing, but I can't believe my Professors believed in me enough and liked my work enough to give it a First. If I get another First this year, I'll leave with a Distinction! So yeah, that's what kind of distracted me this month as well but mainly, I'm just a dumb-dumb over-editor who is never happy lol
I hope you're doing better than me, and everyone is looking forward to Christmas. If you don't celebrate Christmas, then I at least hope you spend some lovely time with your nearest and dearest.
Thank you all again for your continued support and I'll get round to replying to everyone's reviews over the weekend. If you'd like to chat please do shoot me a PM or contact me on twitter at: aobh_fanfiction
Till next time,
Novaer
Aobh x